Satyavira's blog

Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District Court of New York ruled that “the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran liable for the deaths of more than 1,000 people as a result of the September 11 attacks.”

Court filings state that the payout equates to “$12,500,000 per spouse, $8,500,000 per parent, $8,500,000 per child, and $4,250,000 per sibling” to the families and estates of the deceased. The ruling also includes an annual 4.1 percent interest rate from the year the attacks took place.

Thomas Burnett Sr. filed the lawsuit in 2004, but it was only allowed to proceed in 2016 after Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) allowing individual citizens to file lawsuits against countries accused of financing terrorism.

" U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan ruled that the lawsuit may proceed, citing the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which Congress passed by overruling a veto by President Barack Obama, who opposed the law because of the possibility U.S. troops and other government entities could be exposed to lawsuits in other nations.

Daniels also based his ruling on the plaintiffs’ deposition of Zacarias Moussaoui, an Al Queda operative currently serving six life sentences in U.S. federal prison for his role in the 9/11 attacks.

“According to Plaintiffs, Moussaoui’s testimony establishes new facts showing that the Moving Defendants aided Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda by providing funds and other forms of material support in furtherance of the 9/11 Attacks,” Daniels wrote.

In addition, Daniels said the plaintiffs may obtain discovery evidence regarding allegations that two Saudi government agents in California provided assistance to several of the 9/11 hijackers.

Excerpt from latest essay by Phillip Zelikow, publish at The Cypher Brief

"Former senior White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke and a former FBI agent, Mark Rossini, alleged in the History Channel program that the CIA failures to share information with the FBI appear to have been deliberate. This was because, they say, the CIA had hoped to recruit al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi to become agency informants, a plan approved by Director of the CIA Tenet and CIA leadership. This is obviously a grave allegation.

A&E drops new video from former NIST employee. I find the production, the pacing, the length to be really spot on. Will be bookmarking this to send out to people now and when the next Anniversary (Patriots Day) comes around.

"In August of 2016, a former employee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began looking into the reports his agency had released years earlier on the collapse of the World Trade Center. What he found shook him to the core.

In this poignant half-hour interview, Peter Michael Ketcham tells his story of discovering that the organization where he had worked for 14 years had deliberately suppressed the truth about the most pivotal event of the 21st century".

“I am willing to fully testify on the 9/11 case,” Zacarias Moussaoui wrote in broken English in January, “even if I was charge on the death penalty case as it incriminate me.” It is handwritten and signed “Slave of Allah.”

The first docketed letter arrived at war-court judiciary headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, on Nov. 12, 2015 in an envelope from the U.S. penitentiary. In that one he offers to testify about “the real 9/11 mastermind,” then names Saudi Prince Turki, Princess Haifa, and a man named Omar. A lightly redacted Jan. 29, 2016 letter mentions a possible interview with an attorney for KSM — the U.S. intelligence nickname for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused here as the Sept. 11 plot mastermind and awaiting a death-penalty tribunal.

Moussaoui, whose recent letter offered to testify in that case, wrote Pohl last year that he wants to “expose the Saudi Royal double game with UBL,” from Usama bin Laden, another U.S. intelligence acronym.

With Barack Obama leaving the White House and his own 9/11 legacy to be held to account, a few questions really must be asked about how a President Trump figures into the history of 9/11.

1. Is President Elect Trump and his Justice Department going to be open to allowing lawsuits and inquiries to go forward?

2. How Truth is Trump?

Trump is willing to call out fake news media in a way that has never happened before by any contemporary President. Maybe I missed it but the only thing that hasn't been lobbed at him is 9/11 Truth "conspiracy" sympathizer.

Do we have any evidence that Donald Trump knows more about 9/11 from public comments then or now?

In this first clip around 2:35, Trump sounds shades of Jerome Hauer in his answer to the reporter who asks how a building that was made to take plane impacts could be destroyed.

"The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide whether officials in President George W. Bush’s administration — including John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, and Robert Mueller, the former FBI director — may be held liable for policies adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The case began as a class action in 2002 filed by immigrants, most of them Muslim, over policies that swept hundreds of people into a New York City detention center on immigration violations after the attacks. The plaintiffs said that they had been subjected to beatings, humiliating searches and other abuses".

"Plaintiff Stephanie Ross Desimone filed suit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia alleging the nation provided material support to Al-Qaida in its terror attacks against the United States on September 11th, 2001. This represents the first of such filings–there–are almost certainly to be many following, since the United States Congress last Wednesday overrode President Obama’s veto of a sovereign immunity bill allowing foreign governments to be sued in the United States for supporting terrorist acts within the US borders".

"President Obama on Friday vetoed legislation that would allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia over its alleged ties to the terrorists who carried out the attacks. Congressional leaders plan to hold override votes in the coming days and supporters of the legislation say they are confident they can succeed in overturning the president’s action. The Obama administration had until midnight Friday to reject the measure, or it would have automatically become law."

"The judge overseeing the premiere military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay effectively conspired with the prosecution to destroy evidence relevant to defending the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks, according to a scathing court document.

Army Col James Pohl, who this week at Guantánamo is presiding over a resumption of pretrial hearings in the already troubled case, “in concert with the prosecution, manipulated secret proceedings and the use of secret orders”, the document alleges, preventing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s defense team from learning Pohl had permitted the Obama administration to destroy the evidence".

Sources say the Energy and Commerce Committee is mistakenly cutting the bill and almost left off the name.

WASHINGTON -- Just when it looked like a new 9/11 health and compensation law was on the brink of being finalized -- and after House Speaker Paul Ryan threw his support behind it -- sources told The Huffington Post troubling last-minutes snags were emerging.

At one point, sources said, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the health portion of the bill, had left off the name of the legislation -- the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. It was named after a New York City detective who died from illnesses he contracted working on the recovery efforts in the aftermath of the 2001 terror attacks.

"It just shows how inept and uncaring they are," said one advocate who requested anonymity while negotiations are still ongoing.

WASHINGTON -- Two of House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) newly empowered committee chairmen took immediate advantage Thursday of the freshly elected leader's pledge to give power back to committees -- and may have handed him a 9/11-related publicity disaster.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee, both announced measures to temporarily extend the expiring 9/11 health and compensation programs.

In the Vanity Fair article, "There’s Just One Problem with Those Bin Laden Conspiracy Theories "
Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down" and "The Finish", takes aim at Sy Hersh and other "conspiracy theorists" who challenge the OBL death narrative.

"Seymour Hersh arrived late to the game, bringing with him an unmatched reputation for investigative coups—from My Lai to Abu Ghraib—and a scrappy anti-establishment attitude. His two sources told him a different tale. But for his to be true, every one of my sources was lying. And not just my sources, but those for Bergen, Schmidle, and others, too. Also the two SEALs who have told their own versions of the raid. All of them had to be in on the lie".

Professor Quassim Cassam has been awarded £250,000 (or $391, 737) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UK to study what he calls ‘intellectual vices’. The title of his project is ‘Vice Epistemology’.

He believes his research could help to explain how certain claims – for example that 9/11 was masterminded by the US government – are able to gain so much traction.

His findings may also shed light on why some people are susceptible to becoming radicalised in ways that make them potential recruits for extremist organisations such as Islamic State.

Prof Cassam said: “In 2008, a global poll of over 16,000 people found fewer than half believed that al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, with a significant number attributing the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers to a controlled demolition by the US government.

“We live in a world where strange conspiracy theories such as this abound, often with dire social and political consequences. But how are such beliefs to be explained?